The Resort

by Bentley Little

  He started down the sidewalk, passed a set of rooms, took the fork that led to their suite and saw, standing between two saguaros on the upslope ahead and to his left, the activities coordinator. The sight chilled him to the bone. He did not know why, but the activities coordinator was the last person he wanted to meet on an empty walkway in the deserted resort. He sped up, quickening his pace, looking only at the sidewalk. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the man moving down the slope toward him, and he realized with sudden dread that their paths would cross a yard or so up ahead.

  Lowell walked even faster, looking over at the man, and suddenly he was no longer the activities coordinator.

  Rockne. The Reata. One hundred years.

  He was the coach, Coach Hendrie, the P.E. teacher who had made Lowell’s life a living hell in high school for dropping out of varsity baseball.

  No. It was an optical illusion. His mind playing tricks on him. Stress. Something.

  “Thurman!” the man yelled in the coach’s perpetually hoarse voice.

  Lowell kept walking, ignoring him, hoping he would go away. Instinct was telling him to run, but he had too much pride for that, did not want to act like a complete candy-ass pansy, as the coach would say.

  They did meet on the path, and the coach spoke only a few words before moving on.

  “The Roadrunners against the Cactus Wrens,” he said, smiling, his beady eyes boring into Lowell’s. “This afternoon. At the driving range. Be there or else.”

  Then they were both continuing on their respective paths and Lowell, his heart pounding, had to force himself not to run back to the suite and slam and lock the door behind him.

  Owen answered the knock at the door, and his heart soared within him as he saw that it was Brenda. He suddenly felt ten pounds lighter. Ever since his dad had explained that they were trapped here, that everyone who worked at The Reata had disappeared, Brenda had been on his mind. The noble self-sacrificing part of himself hoped that she’d gotten away and was on her way back to California safe and sound. But the larger, selfish part of his being wished that she was still here, trapped with them. He’d even come up with several plausible scenarios all of which ended with the two of them alone and naked together.

  Now she stood before him, and he was grateful. “Hi, Owen,” she said, and it was like none of the insanity was happening around them, as though they were the only two people in the world.

  “Hi,” he said. He didn’t know whether or not to invite her in. Curtis and Ryan knew Brenda but none of them had even mentioned her to their parents and it would be kind of weird to suddenly just announce, “Mom and Dad, this is my girlfriend Brenda.”

  This was his chance to introduce her to them, though, and he stepped aside to let her in. He’d just call her a friend at first. Then once they were back in California and they got to know her a little better, he’d let them know that it was a little more serious. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer, just walked on by him toward his father, and something in the way she moved made him think everything was not as it should be. He glanced over at his brothers, saw puzzlement on Curtis’s face, worry on Ryan’s.

  They’d noticed, too.

  “Mom?” Owen said. “Dad?”

  His parents, talking in the sitting area, turned to look. His dad’s face suddenly turned pale, as though he’d seen a ghost or was about to puke or both.

  “Lowell?” his mom asked worriedly.

  Brenda chuckled, and the sound raised the hackles on the back of his neck, turned his veins to ice. It was a horror show laugh, unlike anything he’d ever heard in real life, and issuing from the mouth of a teenage girl, it seemed obscene and horrendously frightening. The expression on her face was sly. “Long time no see, Lowell.”

  Lowell? What the hell was this?

  “Brenda?” Owen said, confused.

  “Brenda?” his father echoed.

  “Do you two know each other?” his mom asked, and at least the hint of anger and suspicion in her voice was normal, had some grounding in reality.

  “He wanted to fuck me. But I fucked his son instead.” Brenda sidled next to Owen, snaked an arm around his midsection, and somehow it felt slimy. He wanted to pull away from her, but he couldn’t seem to move. This couldn’t be happening. This had to be a nightmare.

  His mom’s face was set in stone, and his dad’s was drained of all color, frozen in open-mouthed shock.

  “She was in my P.E. class,” his dad said lamely. “She went to my high school.”

  Brenda giggled in a way that made Owen want to run for the hills. What his dad said didn’t make any sense . . . but he knew his dad: the man was telling the truth. And right now Owen didn’t know Brenda at all.

  “What are you talking about?” his mom said in a voice filled with righteous anger, and once more she cut through the craziness and brought it back to the here and now.

  Brenda held him tighter, fingers slipping beneath the belt line of his pants, and that was the last straw. He pulled away from her, moving closer to his parents. Curtis and Ryan had retreated back to the doorway of their bedroom.

  “Brenda Hafer was a girl in my P.E. class my junior year in high school.” His dad spoke slowly and clearly. “I had a crush on her. That was twenty . . . twenty-one years ago.” He paused, looked at Brenda and took a deep breath. “This looks like her.” Another pause. “I think it is her.”

  She smiled cunningly. “You wanted to get in my panties, didn’t you, Lowell? You wanted to fuck me.”

  “Stop it!” Ryan screamed, and for a brief second, everything was still. Even Brenda’s horrible smile was momentarily wiped from her face.

  And then their mom took charge. “Get out,” she told Brenda, and advanced on the girl. Surprisingly, Brenda backed up. Owen exhaled, realizing he’d been holding his breath. His mom crowded his girlfriend toward the open doorway, where she backed outside onto the porch before the door was slammed in her face.

  His girlfriend?

  No, she was not that anymore. She never had been. He still didn’t know what was going on, if this was some ghost from his dad’s past returning to take revenge (although she’d seemed awfully solid for a ghost) or if some look-alike—the real Brenda’s daughter perhaps—was playing some sort of elaborate practical joke. Neither of those seemed likely, however, and Owen realized that he now thought of her as part of The Reata, part of the weirdness that had been swirling about them since they’d arrived. He remembered how she hadn’t wanted them to leave the path in Antelope Canyon, had tried to keep them from seeing that other, long deserted resort, and he thought now that that might be important.

  The filters were off, he realized. Whatever had been dampening their interest in what was happening around them, keeping them from speaking out about what they saw or heard or felt, was gone. No longer needed, probably, and that idea scared him.

  “That was the girl from your high school?” his mom asked.

  His dad nodded. “Yeah.”

  She turned to Owen. “How do you know her?”

  “He met her by the pool on Friday,” Ryan offered, and though it was the truth and needed to be said, Owen was a little put off by his brother’s tattletaler tone. “They like each other.”

  “Liked,” Owen said, attempting to inject a little humor into the situation.

  His attempt was not appreciated. “What did you do with her?”

  His face reddened. “Mom!”

  “Was she telling the truth?”

  He looked at his shoes.

  “Well?”

  Reluctantly, he nodded. Glancing over at his brothers, he saw respect and a tinge of jealousy in Curtis’s face. Ryan looked disgusted.

  His mom turned back to his dad. “What is she?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, and his voice was quiet, frightened. “I really don’t know.”

  Thirty-one

  Vicki got out of bed, wincing. Her ass still hurt from the vigorous bout of ana
l sex they’d engaged in last night, and she crouched down and hurried awkwardly across the room toward the bathroom.

  She was getting too old for this.

  Conventional wisdom said that women were at their sexual peak during their thirties, but Vicki had desired sex much more often in her early twenties than she did now, a decade later. Back then, she’d been up for almost anything, and if her night didn’t end with an orgasm she felt as though she’d wasted an evening. But these days, once or twice a week was plenty, and sometimes even that was too much.

  She closed the bathroom door, sat down on the toilet.

  To top it off, she had diarrhea.

  She didn’t know if it was related to the sex, but she assumed it was and she vowed that next time a guy wanted to use the back door, she was going to tell him that entrance was closed for business and steer him around to the front.

  Even if he was someone famous.

  Vicki smiled to herself. It was kind of cool to have been bedded by someone like Patrick, although she’d practically had to throw herself at him to get him to do anything. He was smart, cool, cute, and his celebrity status was the icing on the cake. She wasn’t a groupie by any means, and she certainly wasn’t shallow enough to sleep with someone just because they’d been on television, but she had to admit that having seen him on TV before meeting him had probably raised his standing in her eyes.

  From her right, from the bathtub, came a thump, a noise as if something had fallen, followed almost immediately by a scratching, scuttling sound. The image in her mind was of a rat falling into the tub from a hole in the ceiling and scrambling to get out. Though she wasn’t done and hadn’t even wiped, she stood before turning to look.

  “Oh my God!” she cried. “What’s that?”

  A naked little man, completely hairless and barely bigger than a Ken doll, was trying in vain to scale the rounded slippery sides of the bathtub. He was craning his neck like a baby bird and the strained expression on his face reminded her of the terrible visage of the human-headed fly in the original version of The Fly, that tiny toothless horror who screeched, “Save me! Save me!” before Vincent Price crushed it with a rock.

  She didn’t pause to look longer or to think about what was happening but bolted from the bathroom, grabbing her underwear and pants from the floor, putting them on as fast as she could while she kept one eye on the lighted bathroom. Patrick was nowhere to be seen, and she couldn’t remember if he’d been next to her in bed when she’d gotten up; she’d been too groggy and preoccupied to notice or care. It was conceivable that that thing in the tub was Patrick, and she looked around until she found her top and then dashed out of the room, still slipping her arms through the sleeves.

  Outside, the grounds were quiet. Too quiet. She didn’t know why, didn’t know how, but while the world was usually hushed this early in the morning, there was a different quality to it today, as though some underlying buzz, some subliminal noise that was always there but never recognized, had been taken away.

  She hurried as fast as she could down the sidewalk to her room, trying not to think of that little hairless man in the tub, trying not to imagine him creeping over the bathtub’s edge, running through the bathroom and bedroom and dashing out the door to race crazily along the pathways of The Reata.

  Had she closed Patrick’s door?

  She couldn’t remember.

  Vicki increased her speed. She didn’t see a single soul on the way back to her room, didn’t hear any noises other than the slap of her own bare feet on the cement. Small rocks dug into her heels and soles and she wished she’d stopped to put on her shoes, but that would have taken too long and, besides, her shoes were next to the dresser . . . which was against the wall right next to the bathroom.

  She made it back to her room, took the keycard from her pants pocket and unlocked the door.

  Her friends were gone.

  Their clothes still hung in the open closet, suitcases lay on the floor, but neither bed appeared to have been slept in, and the room had an unfamiliar air of emptiness. She had a bad feeling about this. “April?” she called. “Madi?” She checked the bathroom—even the tub, although she was prepared at a second’s notice to leap out of the way and run—but it too was unoccupied.

  Vicki sat down on her bed, looking over at her friends’ suitcases. April and Madi were gone. Not just gone as in left for home, but gone as in dead. She didn’t know how she knew this but she did, and it suddenly occurred to her that she might be next.

  There was a knock at the door. A single loud rap that sounded like a baseball bat striking the wood.

  Silent, holding her breath, she waited for a follow-up, the giggles of her friends, perhaps, or a call of “Maid service!” but there was nothing.

  The knock came again, even louder this time, and there was something threatening about it. Vicki was suddenly filled with the conviction that if she opened the door, she would meet the same fate as April and Madi.

  Death.

  Another loud bat-against-the-door crack.

  There was no other way out of here. The room did not have a rear exit, and all of the windows opened out in the same direction as the door. Why hadn’t they gotten a room with a patio? Why had they been so damn cheap?

  The sound came again, and it was not just the loudness and suddenness that terrified her, it was the absence of any other noise, the fact that there was no accompanying shout or cry.

  Only the sound of the door being smacked by something powerful.

  Again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Vicki started to cry. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to remain silent, to try to fool whatever was out there into thinking the room was empty and no one was here, but she couldn’t stop herself, and one stifled sob turned into a series of hiccuping cries that sounded especially loud in the morning’s strange silence.

  Crash!

  Whatever was out there was no longer just hitting the door, it was slamming into it, trying to break it down.

  Crash!

  She screamed, releasing a torrent of pent-up fear that manifested itself into uncontrollable shaking and sobbing.

  Crash!

  The door flew in on its hinges, and the big black thing that burst into the room was not at all like the creatures she had imagined.

  It was worse.

  It was much, much worse.

  Patrick returned to his room confused. He was even more confused when he found his door open and Vicki gone. What the hell was this? The Quiet Earth? He called her name, checked the bathroom, even checked the closet just in case she’d had some sort of panic attack and retreated in there, but she was nowhere to be found.

  No one was.

  He’d gone out to get breakfast when he discovered that the phone didn’t work, thinking he could pick up a couple of croissants or bagels and some coffee and juice from one of the resort’s restaurants as a surprise for her, but everything had been closed and looked abandoned. He hadn’t seen any guests or employees anywhere along his route.

  He was going to be so happy to get back to Chicago and the real world and get the fuck away from this godforsaken desert once and for all.

  The next time Tucson had a film festival, McGrath could cover it.

  Patrick was trying to decide what he should do when the door opened behind him. Weren’t those things supposed to lock automatically? He turned to see the activities coordinator standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the morning sun. “You have some explaining to do, Mr. Schlaegel.” The voice was different than it had been, more authoritative, more villainous, with the same sort of overenunciated semi-robotic creepiness as Hugo Weaving in The Matrix movies.

  “I’m busy,” Patrick said, knowing his reply would not make the man go away but attempting to retain some control over the situation and pretend, outwardly at least, that everything was normal.

  The activities coordinator walked into the room, and his face looked slightly different, too, more cle
arly defined, more lined and angular. Menacing. “I think you need to come with me.”

  Patrick was about to decline or disagree, when to his surprise the man reached out and with a vicelike grip grabbed his upper arm, squeezing the muscle. “Hey!” he said, but allowed himself to be led out the door, afraid of what might happen if he resisted. The asshole was strong. Too strong, a part of his brain said, and it was true, but in the litany of strange things that had been going down lately, excess strength was not exactly something that stood out.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, speaking so as to not let intimidation take over completely.

  “Victoria Shanley’s room.”

  He was filled with an apprehension so intense that it nearly stopped him in his tracks. If it wasn’t for the sheer brute strength of the activities coordinator pulling him forward, he would have dug in his heels and refused to continue on. But he knew that if he did so, that painful pressure on his muscle would increase, and it was not hard to imagine the man yanking his arm out of its socket.

  As with his earlier trip to the restaurants, they passed no one else on the way. The resort appeared to be abandoned, and he wondered with a growing sense of horror whether he and the activities coordinator were the only two people left at The Reata. His feeling of dread magnified tenfold.

  Then they reached another building, walked halfway down an open corridor and stopped before room 561. The activities coordinator opened the door to the room, and Patrick’s heart shifted into overdrive. There was blood everywhere, on the floor, on the walls and especially on one of the beds. There was meat on the bed too, or something white that looked vaguely like rent flesh, and Patrick thought of how the maintenance man had killed that monster spider. In his mind he saw the same thing happening to Vicki, saw a uniformed Reata employee hold her down on the bed with one hand while he ripped off her arms and legs with the other, blood splattering every which way.